When it comes to the “Minions” films, part of the “Despicable Me” franchise, it’s best to remember that these endearing yellow, pill-bodied characters are at their funniest when chaos is the point. These films have always been thin on plot, leaning instead into the mischief, mayhem, and escalating absurdity that the Minions can create and maximize. And in “Minions and Monsters,” the Minions find themselves in Hollywood, where their antics collide with the industry’s own brand of spectacle, ego, and carefully manufactured chaos.
The film turns its attention to two Minions. There’s James, the creative one, and Henry, his best friend and protector. James is constantly drawing, painting, and inventing stories to tell, much to the frustration of Dick, the Minions’ leader at the time, who sees James’ imagination as a distraction from their search for a boss.
As that search sends them across different time periods, the film turns each stop into another absurd monster-movie gag. They encounter a Cyclops defeated by James’ LEGO creations, a mummy unraveled by an unfortunate bathroom accident, a pirate king literally being hooked by a minion who is trying to fish, and a wizard accidentally vaporized after the Minions summon an angry pink bunny with laser eyes.
Their search ends when they arrive in 1920s Hollywood, where they meet Max (Christoph Waltz), a director who sees their potential. While Max believes James has what it takes to become a filmmaker, Dick sets his sights on Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a robotic alien bent on invading Earth but completely clueless about how to do it.
While the world quickly falls in love with the Minions, the arrival of sound technology creates a problem. Their Minionese, a mashup of nonsense words and real terms from multiple languages including English, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian, makes them impossible for Hollywood to understand once movies start talking. After they are fired for their inability to speak English, James comes up with a new idea. He will finally tell the story he has been carrying in his head by turning the sketches and storyboards he unknowingly created during their search for a boss into a film.
When James pitches his monster movie, Max tells him that every great monster movie needs one unforgettable monster. That sends James back to the same book that summoned the angry pink bunny, only this time he accidentally brings forth Goomi, a Cthulhu-like creature whose full name is Gary Orcam Oliver Magma Ichabod.
From there, “Minions & Monsters” becomes less about whether the Minions can find a new boss and more about whether James can find the confidence to tell his own story. His creativity is treated like a problem at first, something that slows the group down or gets them into even more trouble. But in true Minions fashion, the very thing that makes James a distraction also becomes the thing that makes him special.
At the same time, James is manipulated by Goomi, who has his own agenda and uses James’ naivety to summon two appetite-driven Kaiju to destroy and eat humans. Phillips, voiced by Bobby Moynihan, is a shark-like monster with a one-track mind who only wants to eat and step on people. Howard, voiced by Phil LaMarr, is an octopus-like kaiju whose equally insatiable appetite turns James’ dream production into an even bigger disaster.
Everything about the film is as frantic and frenzied as the Minions themselves, which is exactly the point. “Minions & Monsters” moves with the energy of a silent comedy short, where every chase, pratfall, and accidental disaster builds into another gag before the audience has time to catch its breath. The film squeezes in an assortment of Hollywood history into the 90 minute runtime. From the Buster Keaton surviving the entire facade of a two-story building collapsing directly toward him. He remains completely unharmed solely because a perfectly positioned open attic window aligns perfectly with his body as the wall falls. Or how Charlie Chaplin manages to survive being squeezed into the machine while the minions are not to far behind, or a reimagined telling of “A Trip to the Moon.”
Not every gag lands with the same force, and the film’s relentless pace can sometimes make it feel like it is sprinting from one joke to the next. This is especially true for the Minions arrival when they disrupt Max filming a western. What the minions believe to be a heist turns out to be a Hollywood production. But that is also part of the appeal. “Minions and Monsters” knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be. It is loud, ridiculous, silly, and proudly overstuffed with monster mayhem and Hollywood nostalgia.
For anyone already exhausted by the Minions, “Minions & Monsters” probably will not change their mind. Expecting anything much deeper from a franchise built on slapstick calamity may be asking a lot, but that is not really the point. For those willing to embrace the madness, the film is a charmingly chaotic love letter to filmmaking, creativity, and the beautiful absurdity of watching a bunch of yellow weirdos accidentally turn Hollywood into their own playground.
7/10
Minions & Monsters in theaters July 1
